Apple makes the best consumer laptops. For me, there's absolutely no denying that this is the case. Apple has had this lead over the competition since the iBook G3 Dual USB 12.1" and 14", and has never lost it. Right now, the rumour mill is abuzz about Apple supposedly prepping to launch a MacBook Pro with a retina display - 2880x1800.

Since Apple's support in their operating systems for larger characters OS-wide is still in the dark ages? I mean land sakes, even X11 WM's do a better job than OSX in that department.

Actually, OS X's HiDPI mode seems to "do what it says on the tin" in a way that I've never seen on Windows or X11.

The difference is that we're not just talking about bumping up font sizes. Having large fonts doesn't help much when every button, icon, and toolbar is half the size you expect, making everything too small to use!

If you switch in HiDPI mode under Lion, you'll see that some apps -- such as Safari -- actually do work pretty well, rendering large fonts in beautiful full resolution *and* rendering large graphics. Web sites that have designed for high-resolution graphics (using SVG or CSS media queries to engage higher-res images) have nice graphics too; others will look much like they would on an iPhone 4 -- sharp text, but graphics a little pixelated. (Warning: anything with Flash on it seems to engage a compatibility mode that puts everything back to low-resolution pixelated horror.)

Other apps that aren't fully updated may show partially or entirely at a lower resolution... but they'll show at the proper *size*, which is more important for having a usable program if you've actually got a 13" 2560x1440 panel or whatever hypothesis is coming...

Traditionally, Windows' DPI setting does change the physical size of things that are measured in "dialog units" (based on font sizes), but anything that uses pixels will often happily render tiny tiny tiny tiny stuff. X11 traditionally has been similar. If either Windows or X11 has improved in this regard I'll be pleasantly surprised!

So far the only other OSs I've seen that do this "correctly" are mobile-focused ones such as Android, where higher-density displays have been on the mass market for a couple years already.